Ostium Loses $18 Million in USDC After Oracle Exploit

Decentralized trading protocol Ostium paused trading on Wednesday after blockchain security firms Blockaid and CertiK reported an apparent exploit of its OLP liquidity vault. Blockaid estimated the exploit resulted in roughly $18 million in losses, while CertiK placed the figure at about $22 million. Both firms attributed the incident to a compromise of Ostium’s oracle system, which supplies external price data to the protocol.

Ostium announced on X that it paused all trading after identifying an issue affecting the vault. It subsequently advised that users temporarily revoke approvals for its contracts until the incident could be further investigated. The protocol stated its team is investigating and has not yet confirmed the cause of the incident or the estimated losses.

Built on Arbitrum, Ostium is an onchain perpetuals trading platform offering leveraged exposure to 75 trading pairs. The incident is the latest in a series of attacks targeting decentralized finance protocols, with security researchers noting a trend of attacks increasingly targeting offchain infrastructure such as oracle systems.